Andres Vanegas Canosa or Andy VCas I know him is a Colombian freelance photographer of Spanish decent. I’ve watched Andy’s adventures through his photography for several years now.

The photos above are taken from his series on leprosy. Some of Andy’s other series are about Laos, Columbia, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Morocco. Andy also has a series on 103 year old people.

The danger inherent in Andy’s work means that he is constantly on the move. In my email today he told me that he is having to move very fast and that even owning a laptop puts him in danger. Fortunately in a few days Andy will be in a much safer country.

I admire Andy’s work and want to share some of it with the reader. You can see more of Andy’s images at http://www.andyvc.com/

dnj Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibitions featuring the work of father and daughter, Todd and Melanie Walker. “Between Light and Shadow” in the main gallery will highlight the pioneering work of the renowned photographer, Todd Walker. Gallery II will explore his influence on the photographs of his daughter, Melanie Walker, in her series entitled “Wanderlust.” This is dnj Gallery’s first exhibition of both artists’ work.

Todd Walker was a prolific visionary who rejected a successful career as a commercial photographer to pursue his own artistic ideas using alternative photographic and printing processes and emerging technology. dnj Gallery’s exhibition celebrates Todd’s unique interpretations of two of the most traditional subjects available: the nude and the landscape. This show emphasizes Todd’s concentration on “visual reality” and his desire to take a closer look at details. Consistent with Todd’s constant experimentation with different media, the exhibition features silk screens, lithographs, collotypes and digital prints. Many of the pieces showcase the Sabattier technique for which Todd is well known.

Regardless of the medium, Todd’s work is about a personal experience. He wrote, “For me, the image from the camera needs to be transformed into a picture. That transformation is an important part of my work. In addition to being involved with the image while using the camera, I must then concentrate that image, with my reaction to the illusions that I have about my environment, and form a concrete picture that attempts to describe and delineate my illusion.”

Todd was born in 1917 in Utah and was raised in Los Angeles. He began his career painting sets for movie studios while attending the Art Center School in Pasadena. Prior to his death in 1998, he was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Previously, he had held positions at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Florida, Gainesville. His work is in the permanent collections of prominent museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona.

For Todd’s daughter, Melanie Walker, photography facilitates a visual dialogue with her father. In “Wanderlust,” Melanie combines images from a decade of travels to investigate experiences of time, place and memory. In creating this series, she was influenced by her father’s writing: “I remember a time, I remember a place, I try to return, It is not here. / The time was here, the place was then. I am now, not then. / Place, time and I happened together, but not again.”

Melanie Walker is an Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Media Art Practices, Photography at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She holds a B.A. from San Francisco State University and an M.F.A. from Florida State University. Her work is in the permanent collections of museums across the country, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona. Her work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions.

This show runs November 3, 2012 to January 5, 2013

Artist Reception Saturday, November 3, 6 – 8 pm

For more information or images, please contact Cambra Sklarz at (310) 315-3551 or cambra@dnjgallery.net.

Concurrent with the October Photographers Exchange meeting at the Irvine Fine Art Center, I will be providing a pop-up PhotoBook exhibit. From my collection are the vast majority of the photobooks that are currently showing in my exhibition at FotoGrafia Festival Internazionale in Rome Italy. The exhibition broadly explores the theme of “work”. I will provide a short introduction to my selection for this exhibition and briefly discuss a few of the photobooks.

Although this is not an official PhotoBook Club event per se, it is an exploratory meet-up to determine an interest in a PhotoBook Club group in Southern California. The issue in the past for similar meet-ups to this has been that Southern California is a very large and spread-out region, that a meet-up in Orange County may not be suitable for those in Santa Monica, the SF valley, SG Valley or San Diego. Thus the main reason that this is an exploratory meet-up!

This pop-up exhibition will not have the same polished appearance as my exhibition in Rome, as one component will be missing. For the Rome exhibition, I asked the participating photographers to re-photograph their book’s interior and we then hung these photographs around the book display. Nevertheless, these re-photographs are available here. Additionally, I will bring a few other photobooks from my collection that also investigate the theme of “work”.

The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present a selection of work from renowned Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. This exhibition, curated (culled) from a private collection, features large format photographs documenting the extraordinary global landscapes created as a result of human industry— mining, quarrying, rail cutting, ship breaking, mass recycling, and oil refining. Produced with exacting detail in large scale, Burtynsky’s photographs exist in a delicate balance between a sobering reality and sublime beauty.

Specifically, this exhibition features a vignette of Burtynsky’s ambitious effort to document the staggering destruction of the Three Gorges Dam project—the world’s largest hydro-electric engineering feat to control the notoriously tempestuous and equally mythic Yanghtzee River in order to generate power for China’s booming population. This series, similar in spatial grandeur but palpably different from Burtynsky’s other work, is visually dense, apocalyptic, and ironically beautiful with each monochromatic vista of vast rubble resembling a traditional Chinese watercolor.

Although Burtynsky captures the consequences of our ever expanding footprint, he manages to evade the stereotype of an “environmentalist”, a movement which Burtynsky believes has largely failed. “It’s about messaging. It’s not about indicting.” Burtynsky has said in a recent interview. His photographs, which rarely contain people, successfully avoid making blanket judgments. “We are implied. There is an empathetic moment in my work. I see it as a thirty year lament at the loss of nature at our hands, at the expense of our expansion. Underneath every picture is that fact that nature is being pushed back and our footprint is just getting bigger. And I am that edge… trying to show that we are taking over more and more.” (Spread Art Culture Interview, September 2010).

“Burtynsky’s photographs appear to us as images of the end of time. The abandoned mines and quarries, the piles of discarded tires, the endless fields of oil derricks, and the huge monoliths of retired tankers show how our attempts at industrial ‘progress’ often leave a residue of destruction. Nevertheless there is something uncannily beautiful and breathtaking in the very expansiveness of these images – it is as if the vastness of their perspective somehow opens onto the longer view of things. For Burtynsky, nature itself, over time, can reclaim even the most ambituous of himan incursions into the land. As long as human needs and desires change, so too will the landscape.” (Lori Pauli, “Seeing the Big Picture”, Manufactured Landcapes, National Gallery of Canada, 2003)

Edward Burtynsky’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally. Burtynsky’s most recent monographs include China, Oil, Quarries, and the museum exhibition catalogue Manufactured Landcapes produced in conjunction with the first major retrospective of Burtynsky’s work organized by the National Gallery of Canada. Among Burtynsky’s many awards and distinctions include the TED prize and The Outreach Award at Recontres d’Arles. Burtynsky is an active lecturer on photography, and founder and president of Toronto Image Works, a landmark photographic lab and technical education facility in Toronto, Ontario where Burtynsky lives and works.

“..I try to photograph things that capture our imagination – that aren’t just records of something. There is a transcendent quality to the pieces that transport us away from reality to a world of wonder—[I want to be able] to show a place that is familiar, yet unfamiliar.”

This exhibition runs September 6 through October 20, 2012

Fahey.Klein Gallery is located at 148 North La Brea, Los Angeles, CA 9003

The Fahey/Klein Gallery is proud to present Matthew Niederhauser’sunique vision of China’s consumer awakening, Visions of Modernity. Comprised of four distinct series, this extraordinary documenting of Beijing’s rapid social, economic, and technological development in the first decade of the 21st century highlights the unique and idiosyncratic directions of China’s unprecedented growth into, as Niederhauser calls it, China’s “Gilded Age.” As a new capitalist ethos pervades Chinese culture, Niederhauser’s Visions of Modernity documents the complex, fraught, and often-ironic stages of this epic transformation.

“Megablocks,” the first series in the project, examines the formation of a new Beijing surrounding the capitol’s former imperial core, and with it, a new vision of modern China. Megablocks form as huge swaths of land are fashioned into towering apartment high-rises interwoven with malls and public spaces. Once built, they form distinct urban islands, bounded by grand avenues and hemmed in by larger highways. Their imposing and monotonous facades mark an elaborate transformation of social practices that continues to occur at an alarming pace across the city.

As megablocks become the status quo across Beijing, they not only drastically reshape the city, but also the manner in which people consume. In 2006, Ikea opened a massive 430,000 square foot location in Beijing, currently the third largest in the world. Stimulated by the construction boom and the increasingly materialistic nature of today’s China, Beijing proved fertile ground for Ikea’s economical but trendy furnishing. In “Homes,” the second series in Visions, shoppers’ desirous looks and gestures abound as they settle into couches, armchairs, and beds, “living” in Ikea’s numerous showrooms. Each photograph suspends the customers in their appropriated Ikea environments, as if they were in their own residences. Here, new found nesting habits shaped by megablocks are satisfied.

In the new Beijing economy, no one wants to be a pedestrian, and vehicle purchases in China surpassed the United States for the first time in 2009. The biennial Beijing International Automotive Fair is ground zero for the consumer frenzy and ostentatious materialism of hundreds of thousands of Chinese car enthusiasts. Manufactures gather to capitalize on the seemingly insatiable demand for automobiles. Provocatively styled models strike poses in every booth while eager new consumers clamor to take a seat in their favorite vehicle in the giant exhibition halls. Niederhauser’s “Cars” series epitomizes the praxis of China’s reification and fetishism enabled by the increase of disposable income, opportunity, and a culture of consumption on overdrive.

But ownership is never enough, and acquisition does not quench the consumer drive. After Beijing’s nouveau riche tire of monotonous megablock apartments and endless traffic jams, they need a vacation. While a passport to the monuments and landmark of the world still signal the highest social status and opportunities of wealth, a favorite local travel destination for the upwardly mobile is the Beijing World Park. Tucked into the southwestern corner of the city, the Beijing World Park boasts over a hundred small-scale replicas of famous monuments and buildings from all over the world. The final series of the quartet, “Vacations,” captures staged encounters with objects of “modern” and “civilized” lifestyles, a bizarre artifact of the post-Communist materialism of China’s meteoric expansion.

Ultimately, Beijing serves as a template for China’s cultural ambition, and Visions of Modernity epitomizes the competing moral and cultural directions of the largest emerging capitalist market on the planet. Like many established first-world economies, the nouveau riche of Beijing spend most of their disposable income on homes, cars, and vacations. Niederhauser’s Visions frames the tension of desire and acquisition, the fantasy of consumer capitalism being lived out in the façades of Western imports. While China’s exploding population consolidates into ever increasing urban densities, the corresponding rise in wealth enables acquisition as fantasy fulfillment as a replacement for a culture being subsumed by mass-produced facsimiles of history, normalcy, and tradition. Visions of Modernity engages Beijing’s embrace of the mirage of consumer satisfaction, the quixotic pursuit of happiness through the possession of a never ending barrage of the new, the improved, the modern.

Matthew Niederhauser is an artist, photojournalist, and videographer currently chronicling the massive changes in Chinese culture. His photography has been featured in The New Yorker, National Geographic, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Time, and several important international publications. He continues to develop his documentary projects in China and lives in New York when not abroad. This is his first show at the Fahey/Klein Gallery.

This exhibition runs September 6 through October 20, 2012

The Fahey/Klein Gallery is located at 148 North La Brea, Los Angeles, CA 90036